Roadmap Updated and Important Change

Exciting things are on the Joomla! horizon. Today marks the announcement of an updated Joomla! Roadmap and the announcement of the first, of hopefully many, Officially Supported Components. Due to keen interest from the international community, and the amazing pace of work that the core team of Joomla! has achieved recently, we are able to bump a new version into the roadmap so that the wait for some actively required features will be soon over with the release of Version 1.1. This has left room for extra work in Version 1.2 and we are able to bring forward the addition of access control features (ACL) which we are sure will be a welcomed inclusion.

Also, we are now committing to release and/or support certain popular components as "Officially Supported Components", the first of which will be JoomFish. This means some of the features the community has been asking for will be supported by Joomla!.

These components are not going to be included in the core download itself to keep it's size relatively modest. This leaves the default installation clean for those not needing the features, but by taking the approach of supporting them with the necessary "hooks" for easy integration we remove the need for custom hacks that need to be redone on each new release. We will have an out-of-the-box Joomla! that is suitable for all and advanced, officialy approved, functionality provided for those that need it.

Users can have confidence that these components will be ready for new versions of Joomla!, but this also allows for the components to advance independently of the core roadmap itself.

Joomfish (formerly known as Mambelfish) will be the first Officialy Supported Component. Watch out for an imminent release date. Other potential candidates include a Unit Testing framework and a complete set of replacement templates in Version 1.2 that allow compliance with Useability and Accessibility guidelines.

Therefore, the roadmap for Joomla! is shown below and some of the major points for each release are included:

Version 1.1 (Schedule for release early November 2005)

Translation of the static text in the Adminstrator
Addition of basic right-to-left (RTL) support
Improved handling for non ISO-8859-1 character sets by implementing UTF-8
Addition of User Bots to allow for other methods of authentication (such as LDAP) and improve bridge work with other applications
Addition of SSL bot to support https secure sites

Version 1.2

Foundational work to support other database platforms
Improved access control handling (ability to add custom groups and assign access to different functions, but no change to content access).
Improved caching
Separation of logic and presentation layer with patTemplate
New javascript framework
FTP based installation mode
Foundational Useability and Accessibility work
Improved SEF support

Version 1.3